The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2008 (June 16 - 22, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  Again, I spent quite some time refining my build setup and discussing Mercurial for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, and calendar entered the scene as a possible additional project sharing this repository.
  Nothing has been decided yet, but a lot of things are out there to decide and we'll follow along.
  I also filed some bugs about fixes we probably need in Lightning independent of what repository calendar ends up in.
• Automated Testing:
  I filed a bug about the problem we have with xpfe autocomplete failing Mac tests.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  I've sent out mail to the Council and a number of active developers, and I got a few replies, a status meetings wiki page has been set up as well with a few pieces of information, something's definitely starting to get going here.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  The release process is going forward, but there were a few last-minute security fixes in Gecko we needed to take, so we made a respin of the 1.1.10 candidates and rescheduled the release for July 1.
• Help Updates:
  I finally updated the patch for the helper applications help again.
• Various Discussions:
  Firefox 3 release and download day, session (re)store, toolbar customization, treelines, Thunderbird/mailnews development, mozilla-central/1.9.1, bidi support, etc.

While Firefox has neared and released a major new version with really great marketing and resulting download numbers, and Thunderbird development has picked up so they could release their first alpha and are preparing the next one, news have been a bit silent on the SeaMonkey side recently. When seeing what the collection of status item in the meeting agenda is revealing, I start to get more optimistic again and feeling that we are on the right track after all. We surely need all the help we can get, but I hope at least over the summer we can get to a stage where we can show off a first testing version of a finally toolkit-based Internet suite to the community, which will be a great milestone.

That said, we of course want to integrate some things that are new, try out how well some things developed for Firefox 3 can work for us and test some changed default settings. We will surely not going to ever include a clone of Firefox as our browser, but sometimes we'll introduce changes in an alpha just to see how a wider audience than the hardcore nightly users reacts. Please don't kill off efforts to do that before we have the chance to get such feedback. Oh, and if you know concrete things you like better in SeaMonkey than in Firefox, please let us know, preferably on the newsgroups / mailing lists - not that we want to fight our friend Firefox, but we want to know how we can target our niche of the market even better.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2008 (June 9 - 15, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  I again spent a lot of time this week with figuring out SeaMonkey and Thunderbird building with mozilla-central, blogging about it and posting on the newsgroups about this topic, as well as fiddling out more details, like removing (almost) all the hacks I had in my build setup in the beginning. And, of course, I discussed the topic with people on IRC.
  Additionally, I got Lightning to build (but not install yet), which I still need to document (and which needs a few fixes build-wise when calendar goes hg). From discussions on IRC, I feel we badly need to discuss the whole topic with calendar people directly, as our views of the future world diverge a bit there.
  The L10n story is still something I need to figure out, it might still need some tweaks.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  We had a small bit of discussion about this on IRC, we might go for biweekly meetings, not sure if we'll do them on the phone or on IRC though.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  It's been some time, but finally, another security release is for 1.1.x is due later this month - I took the first steps on the release process, i.e. version update and tagging on the release branch, as well as starting the generation of 1.1.10 candidates.
• Various Discussions:
  OS X address book, cleaning out old L10n nightlies, session (re)store, toolbar improvements, treelines, tab preview, Thunderbird/mailnews development, mozilla-central/1.9.1, etc.

A discussion about the status of SeaMonkey Composer came up on newsgroups, and it's pretty interesting: I'm reading a lot about different people and groups using and promoting SeaMonkey Composer for designing simple HTML pages, I heard of teachers using it in classes, and recently, even a German publishing house sent a request for putting SeaMonkey on their book CD as they described how to use it in the book.
Composer is becoming one of the strong arguments for SeaMonkey nowadays, it seems, especially in the light of all the spinoffs either being unmaintained (Nvu), unfinished ("Mozilla Composer") or still based on old code (KompoZer). We have the only stable release of Composer code that's based on Gecko 1.8(.1), and the only development series of it that works with 1.9.x.
Unfortunately, the Composer-specific code is also not actively developed (a lot of the functionality is shared with mailcompose and Midas though), while we still maintain it to a state that it stays working and can be released even in SeaMonkey 2. If someone comes up and works on improving this code, possibly even porting improvements from Nvu/KompoZer to our code, it would be very much appreciated and find a good base of users.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 23/2008 (June 2 - 8, 2008):

• Automated Testing:
  TUnit on the Linux tinderbox is off now, the new buildbots are happily running that instead.
  Unfortunately, we still have no clue why a few autocomplete tests fail only on the Mac unit test machine but not on the other platforms. Help would be appreciated.
• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  I spent most of my time this week on trying to get a proof of concept on "option A" of Benjamin's repository options doc, actually with nice success. A bug report for tracking this is now open, app-config.mk/app-rules.mk have been introduced to help us there (thanks Benjamin!), and I filed a bug on the make-makefile issue with that, with a hacky patch for now, but Ted is looking into a better solution.
  In the end, I got SeaMonkey and Thunderbird to generate working build off that structure, a doc about how to get it to work is up on the wiki, but it still describes a few hacks (mainly the symlinks into mozilla/). We can ride on the Mozilla build system even with our repository being the parent of mozilla/ - we just need to prefix the --enable-application value with ../ and have the objdir path end in /mozilla, but we probably can hide both of those via top-level build system entry files (client.mk/configure) in our own repository once we have one. I also (locally) have a client.py that pulls all the source we need.
  All in all, there are a few things we still need to figure out, but there's a good proof-of-concept of the structure, opening the possibility to chose this option for our future. I may possibly do another post with more details in the next few days.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  This is still on my TODO list, I'd really like to get something going there.
• Various Discussions:
  Mail client cert prompts, about: privileges, OS X address book, MoFo ED Search, Thunderbird/mailnews development, mozilla-central/1.9.1, etc.

While I'm working on getting us to a new build structure that allows us to have SeaMonkey and Thunderbird source in a new, shared hg repository and build with mozilla-central/1.9.1, I'm getting more and more convinced that both our projects should ditch 1.9.0.x and go straight for 1.9.1 instead, leaving cvs behind for our development. There's still a bit of work to do before everything runs smoothly that way, but I think the sooner we do this the easier we can deliver a release on the new version control infrastructure - and the easier we still can get platform changes into Mozilla 1.9.1 where we come across needing those. Note though that this is completely my personal opinion, there has been no decision in either of our two projects about this.

Here's a (very late, sorry) summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 22/2008 (May 26 - June 1, 2008):

• Automated Testing:
  The new Mac unit test machine is up and running, but failing some address book unit tests (missing OS X integration) and some autocomplete mochitests (reason still unknown).
  Also, there were no negative comments about turning off the TUnit tests on the Linux tinderbox, so I'll do that soon.
• Preference Migration:
  The advanced pref panel is checked in now, so all top-level panels are now migrated!
• Windows cygwin builds:
  As I have an old cvs trunk tinderbox running with cygwin, I checked in a fix for building 1.9.0.x with cygwin.
• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  We had lots of discussions around the future of SeaMonkey's (and possibly Thunderbird's) source code management after Mozilla trunk has moved to mozilla-central, which is hosted in hg and will not only result in a Mozilla later on, but even in 1.9.1 - which is possibly what we want to base Thunderbird 3 and SeaMonkey 2 on.
  As a possible way to having our own code in hg as well and using this 1.9.1 mozilla-central repo for the platform code, Benjamin Smedberg proposed several repository options. We have no firm decision on what options we will go with, but there seems to be a strong tendency across multiple core developers of our teams to go with "option A", which would build the platform in a subdirectory of our own repository.
• German L10n:
  SeaMonkey L10n is complete again on trunk, though it stays orange due to the string from news header filters which I did leave in hoping that the original patch comes back.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  Unfortunately there has been no feedback to this, I still want to drive that forward though.
• Various Discussions:
  ChatZilla and chrome.manifest, session (re)store, Thunderbird/mailnews development, Firefox Plus Summit, etc.

Sorry for being quite late again this week with the status update, but this week I've been quite busy with getting working proof that we can build SeaMonkey with mozilla-central and finally have a hacky but working way for doing this. I have pushed back blogging this status update for that, I hope you don't mind.
I'll probably write up another blog post about this in the next few days, but it feels good to know how we can build SeaMonkey based on 1.9.1, so the option is open!